Duration literals

[mcandre]

Proposal: Duration literals for Go values and associated JSON, YAML representations, in order to reduce the likelihood of mistakes in application configurations.

No more forgetting, wondering about days vs nanoseconds vs seconds vs hours months vs business quarters vs milliseconds. No more gaps and misleading statements in documentation.

No more conversion errors. Just human readable durations, direct to well-defined machine values.

ISO 8601 format for duration literals would be a good place to start.

https://www.digi.com/resources/documentation/digidocs/90001437-13/reference/r_iso_8601_duration_format.htm

[randall77]

ISO 8601 uses things like "month" and "day" which aren't fixed duration. There's no clear way to translate such a thing into a machine value, e.g. float64 seconds.

[ianlancetaylor]

Can you give an example of how this would be used? I'm not clear on whether you are asking for a change to the language, or a change to an existing standard library package, or a new standard library package.

See also https://golang.org/pkg/time/#ParseDuration.

[ianlancetaylor]

And, of course, the Go standard library already has type time.Duration and you can already write code like

const shortMonth = 30 * 24 * time.Hour
const longMonth = 31 * 24 * time.Hour
const februaryStandard = 28 * 24 * time.Hour
const februaryLeap = 29 * 24 * time.Hour

[bcmills]

No more conversion errors.

See also #20757.

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